Part ethnography, part memoir, and part critical reflection on the Anthropocene, this book examines the ways that islands form and inform human experiences of the everyday and the extraordinary. Utilizing carefully considered anthropological perspectives drawn from over a decade of anthropological fieldwork, the author employs islands as a complex set of lenses to examine the ways that we are intimately connected, separated, and divided from ourselves, one another, and the planet. Moving across time, place and disciplinary boundaries, this book traces a narrative route from the remote islands of Micronesia to the subarctic expanses of northern Iceland, all in service of gaining a deeper understanding of the cultural resonance of islands. This book offers the reader a type of ideological travel guide, one that exchanges restaurant reviews and hotel recommendations for pathways of reflection and new modes of seeing and being in the world. It will be of interest to scholars in the social sciences and humanities, and readers from human geography, cultural studies, sociology, philosophy and American studies.

Series Information:
CultureWork: A Book Series from the Center for Literacy and Cultural Studies at Harvard

This set publishes some of the leading European contributors to the early formation of historical and social science analysis of the orient. The collection concentrates on those authors who have shaped the modern debate on orientalism, especially on Islam, the Middle-East and orientalism in the late and early twentieth centuries.

Series Information:
The Ainu Library

This book considers secularism and its narrative expressions. It shows how secularism is articulated, and transmitted ubiquitously within state institutions and outside of them. Abdelmajid Hannoum does this by dissecting, in a series of essays, a variety of narrative forms, interrogating modes of their constitution and production, the dynamics of their translatability, the politics of their use, the struggle over their status of truth, and the conditions that make secular narration so central to our existence. The book ranges from a medieval narrative of the secular to a modern narrative, to anthropological secularism and religious experiences, to narratives of translation produced by what the author calls translation ideology, to historical narratives regulated by archival power and state secrecy, to narratives of violence, to narratives of recollection, as well as narratives of silence. Particular attention is paid to postcolonial French contemporary cultures and politics. Transdisciplinary approaches are deployed to not only reframe old questions in new ways but to posit new questions out of old ones. In doing so this innovative work opens up fresh discursive possibilities that cross traditional disciplines. It will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, history, and beyond.

Retopia tells the story of social innovation in times of crisis, and through its cross-disciplinary narrative it goes beyond existing forms of future anticipation and maps out a practice-based approach to the creation of new realities. It explores how new imaginaries, social experiments, and laboratories of societies can create spaces of possibilities, revalidate the peripheries, and create new forms of social coherence. The peripheral regions in Europe are facing a crisis triangle: depopulation, the rise of the 'useless' class, and outdated social welfare systems. It is a crisis of political imaginaries and a lack of inspiring political stories. In response to this, the book specifically focuses on the concept of 'retopia', the idea of creating inclusive spaces of social innovation that encourage active participation. Through the creation of relocalized societies with a high degree of autonomy in 'left-over' spaces such as Sicily, Western Latvia or Northern Bulgaria, retopian redevelopment schemes offer new perspectives on 'ruined spaces'. Retopia uncovers the common links and limitations of utopian studies, future studies, degrowth, narratology, the commons, and political geography. Retopia: Creating New Spaces of Possibility is an articulation of the potentialities of social innovation, political imaginaries, and future images, provoking a stimulating discussion among scholars and students in the fields of Politics and Future and Anticipation Studies.

This volume provides a critical examination of the uses and abuses of indigenous knowledge. The contributors focus on a series of interrelated issues in their interrogation of indigenous knowledge and its specific applications within the localized contexts of particular Asian societies and regional cultures.In particular they explore: the problems of translation and mistranslation in the local-global transference of traditional practices and representations of resource management; the match and mismatch of practical reasoning in indigenous subsistence regimes and their depictions by outsiders; and the developmental and political consequences of contemporary ethnic and regional claims rooted in an ideology of "traditional" indigenous knowledge.

The controversy surrounding the significant "Into the Heart of Africa" exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada is explored in this compelling and analytical text. The exhibit has become an international, controversial touchstone for issues surrounding the politics of visual representation, such as the challenges to curatorial and ethnographic authority in multicultural and postcolonial contexts. Asking why the museum's exhibit failed so many people, the author examines such issues as institutional politics, the broad political and intellectual climate surrounding museums, the legacies of colonialism and traditions of representation of Africa, and the politics of irony.
By drawing upon anthropological and cultural criticism, the book offers a unique account of the ways in which an ambiguous exhibit about colonialism became the site of an expansiveInto the Heart of Africa."

How do we become who we are? How is it that people are so similar in the ways they differ from one another, and so different in the ways they are the same?
Christina Toren's theory of mind as not only a physical phenomenon, but an historical one, sets out to answer these questions by examining how the material world of objects and other people informs the constitution of mind in persons over time.
This theory of embodied mind as a microhistorical process is set out in the first chapter, providing a context for the nine papers that follow. Questions explored include the way meaning-making processes reference an historically specific world and are responsible at once for continuity and change, how ritual informs children's constitution of the categories adults use to describe the world, and how people represent their relationships with one another and in so doing come to embody history.
Mind, Materiality and History has direct relevance to current debates on the nature of mind and consciousness, and demonstrates the centrality of the study of children to social analysis. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars with an interest in anthropological theory and methodology, as well as those engaged in material culture studies.

Embodied Geographies provides a comprehensive account of different types of life crises which develop our identities and affect how we live our lives. Chapters focus on:
* pregnancy, childbirth, teenagers and parenthood
* migration
* the threat and reality of violence
* illness and disability
* bereavement, the ensuing family responsibilities and death itself.
It includes case studies from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Canada and the USA.

This volume investigates how international students in and from the Middle East are constructed by nations, institutions, other students, and themselves. Making a valuable contribution to understanding the nuances and complexities of educational politics and priorities affecting these constructions, the text considers the broader impacts of discourse on internationalisation. Offering a unique combination of critical analysis of educational policies combined with empirical contributions through authors' own research, chapters highlight intersections between politics, the internationalisation of higher education, and the construction of mobile learners. Emphasising variation and nuance in the internationalisation of policies in the Gulf Cooperation Countries, and other Middle Eastern countries, the volume offers a theoretical framework to help understand the political, educational, and ethical implications of emerging constructions of international students and their comparison across the Middle East. This timely volume will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in higher education, international and comparative education, as well as the Middle East more specifically. Those involved with educational education policy and politics, specifically related to the Middle East, will also benefit from this volume.

The result of 25 years of research with different tribal groups in the Arabian peninsula, this study focuses on ethnographic description of Arab tribal societies in five regions of the peninsula, with comparative material from others. Having become aware of the depth in time of Arab tribal structures, the authors have developed a view of Arabic tribal discourse where "tribe" is seen as essentially an identity that confers access to a social structure and its processes. This insight enables the authors to clarify tribal processes of land use and resource management which are normally "invisible," as they leave few written records and the archaeological remains are notoriously difficult to date. The contextual nature of description by local users leads to a reevaluation of social categories, and to an awareness of relationships between bedouin and peasant, tribesman and townsman. A detailed appreciation of the different agricultural, pastoral and fishing practices of the region is presented, together with the underpinning of indigenous theories of land use and resource management. This detailed monograph incorporates many theoretical aspects, including concepts of indigenous theories

Fascinating case studies, the majority of which are based on original field work, are presented in this second volume of the "Food in History and Culture" book series. "Changing Food Habits" examines the integral connection between food and ongoing ecological, economic, political, and social transformations. This text also provides research on dietary changes resulting from direct interventions by individuals and food programs.
Among the topics discussed, authors consider rural and urban modes of food consumption, dietary changes in different societal contexts, and food-based rituals. Cases presented in this volume suggest alternative readings of some established models of changing food habits, and contribute to a more comprehensive history of dietary transformations.

This book examines the cultural, social, political, economic and aesthetic history of Sport in Europe. As sport has grown, progressively replacing religion, in its power to excite passion, provide emotional escape, offer fraternal (and increasingly sororital) bonding, it has become an inescapable reality linking public environment with intimate experience and thus offers the historian an opportunity to inspect and attempt to grasp all the dimensions of the recent past and their relative share in individual and collective experience. This collection considers the evolution of modern sport in Europe and examines its relationshop with politics, gender and class.

This book examines the cultural, social, political, economic and aesthetic history of Sport in Europe. As sport has grown, progressively replacing religion, in its power to excite passion, provide emotional escape, offer fraternal (and increasingly sororital) bonding, it has become an inescapable reality linking public environment with intimate experience and thus offers the historian an opportunity to inspect and attempt to grasp all the dimensions of the recent past and their relative share in individual and collective experience. This collection considers the evolution of modern sport in Europe and examines its relationshop with politics, gender and class.

This is the first full length account of the life and ideas of Mary Douglas, the British social anthropologist whose publications span the second half of the twentieth century.
Richard Fardon covers Douglas' family background, and the pervasive influence of her catholic faith on her writings before providing an analysis of two of her most influential works; Purity and Danger (1966) and Natural Symbols (1970). The final section deals with Douglas' more controversial writings in the fields of economics, consumption, religion and risk analysis in contemporary societies. Throughout, Fardon highlights the centrality of Douglas' role in the history of anthropology and the disciplines struggle to achieve relevance to contemporary, western societies.

The rubric "Quality of Life" first came to the explicit attention of the medical profession a little over thirty years ago. Despite the undoubted fact that each one of us has his or her own Quality of Life, be it good or bad, there is still no general agreement about its definition, or the manner in which it should be evaluated. Although much has been written about quality of life, this work has been largely concerned with population-based studies, especially in health policy and health economics. The importance of "individual" quality of life has been neglected, in part because of a failure to define quality of life itself with sufficient care, in part perhaps because of a belief that it is impossible to develop a meaningful method of measuring individual variables.
The editors of this book believe that the primary focus of quality of life is and must continue to be the individual, who alone can define it and assess its changing personal significance. The challenge of presenting this belief

This book examines France's hosting of the soccer World Cup, held in ten cities in summer 1998. It covers the major socio-economic, political, cultural and sporting dimensions of this global sports event, including bidding for and organizing the Finals, the improvement of sporting and transport infrastructures, marketing, merchandzing and media coverage, policing and security during the month-long competition and building a national team. The analysis of France 98 is set within the sporting context of the recent history and organization of French football (the links between football, money and politics; the sporting public) and more broadly within the French tradition of using major cultural and sporting events to focus world attention of France as a leader in the international community. The book concludes with an evocation of the day-to-day impact of four weeks of sporting festivities, and the lessons to be drawn concerning sport and national identity in an era of increasing economic, political, cultural and sporting globalization.

The title, Behemoth, derives from the Hebrew word Behemah-a beast, an enormous creature, monstrously huge and vast. It is an apt description of the State on the eve of the twenty-first century. Loved by few, vilified by many from all perspectives, it nonetheless continues to grow; by turns rivaling and co-opting that more pleasant-sounding word: Society. Political sociology aims to define and understand the interrelationship between these two huge terms: State and Society.

Continuing in a path begun by Horowitz in the 1950s in The Idea of War and Peace in Contemporary Social and Philosophical Thought, expanded upon in the 1970s with Foundations of Political Sociology, this summing up in the late 1990s is an effort to extract and evolve the canon of political sociology. Starting with Montesquieu, Horowitz proceeds through the European experience of Rousseau, Tocqueville, Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Sorel, and Weber. He then takes the field on its tangled migration to America with the Frankfurt School in exile, followed by searching chapters on Schumpeter, Mills, Arendt, and Huntington, among others.

The result is a stunning revaluation of the intellectual sources of the present day divisions between statists and socialists, welfarists and individualists, advocates of dictatorship and of democracy, mandated rules and voluntary association, hard realists and soft utopians, a world without states and a world with a single state. Horowitz does not offer the usual evolutionary notion of doctrines, but a canon embedded in and embattled with the societies they aim to serve or overthrow in the present as in the past. The result is a major recasting of the theory and practice of social science and normative frameworks.

The final chapter offers Horowitz's own prognosis of what we can expect in the recasting of the Welfare State to include the Welfare Society, and its growing nemesis the global economy which threatens to engulf State and Society alike in a return to civilizational concerns. This is an essential text for policy-makers and social scientists interested in macroscopic changes in the political order.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203801350

eBook available with sample pages: 0203801407

Diaspora and Visual Culture marks the new importance of diaspora as a means of understanding the new modes of postnational identity. In examining the visual culture of the "classic" African and Jewish diasporas, contributors address different aspects of the multiple viewpoints inherent in diasporic cultures. Two key introductory essays by Stuart Hall and the painter R.B. Kitaj highlight the intersections of diaspora and cultural identity.
The subsequent essays examine individual instances of diaspora as diverse as homosexuality in the Dreyfus Affair, the Caribbean-Jewish Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, Yoruba diaspora art and performance in Brazil and New York, identity in the art of African-American women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the formation of American, European and Israeli artistic identity and the possibility that queer culture is diasporic.

Author Biography:
Paul L. Wachtel is a CUNY Distinguished Professor in the doctoral program in clinical psychology at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is a clinical psychologist of international reputation and the author of numerous books, including The Poverty of Affluence, Therapeutic Communication, Action and Insight and Psychoanalysis, Behavior Therapy, and the Relational World.

Whether initiating girls or healing cattle, bringing rain or protesting taxation, many in Africa share a vision of a world where the cultural, symbolic and cosmic categories of 'male' and 'female' serve, through ritual, to both reimagine and transform the world. Those Who Play With Fire introduces recent gender theory to the analysis of African ethnography, exploring the ways in which ideational gender categories permeate African systems of thought and ritual practices. Thus, the book provides a powerful framework with which to evaluate previous ethnographic material on Africa. In addition, Those Who Play With Fire presents a broad range of new case studies - of hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists and pastoralists - revealing the varied and complex ways in which African ideas and ideals of what it means to be 'male' and 'female' broadly inform and give meaning to a wide range of transformative rituals.

From the Preface When I first went to Africa in the 1960s, I was bowled over by African art. What really got under my skin were the bangles, principally the bronze bangles from West and Central Africa. They were tactile, weighty and full of design and form. Later, when I lived in Ghana and Togo, I built up my own collection of bangles. In recent years this collection was seen by past and present curators of the British Museum and I was encouraged to work up the expertise to comment on and possibly help classify the Museum's collection of African bangles. They recognised that they have thousands of these bangles lying mostly untouched and unloved because they could not be given a story, a context, a meaning. They were so enthusiastic and helpful that I secured introductions to many major museums around the world, to study their substantial and interesting collections. Museums in Europe and on the East and West Coasts of the United States gave me access to the rich material they had accumulated. I had the rare privilege of spending days in their storerooms in the course of which I could see and compare many thousands of bangles. The curators who accompanied me in the inspection of their bangles were aware that these beautiful artefacts had lain undisturbed because they could not be explained or set in a wider context. The bangles were attractive but seldom came with a meaningful provenance. To their great credit, these highly-qualified specialists would listen enthusiastically as my wife and I noted bangles which we had encountered elsewhere. Seeing all these bangles and thus, over time, gradually building up a picture of their types, uses and probable areas of origin, I began to realise that I was looking at a decorative culture which was self-generated, wholly unlike the decorative cultures of the rest of the world. It was unique. Astonishingly, it was to be found in almost every inhabited part of the vast semi-continental area of sub-Saharan Africa. Gold and silver were of little consequence. Copper was their "precious metal". The style - instantly recognisable - was chunky, solid, weighty. Rarity was not a concern; the Eurasians' "precious stones" were unknown. Rings had no great meaning. It was bangles that were the standard means of conveying status, attraction and readiness for marriage. Most importantly, as I read the stories of explorers and the later accounts of African life in the 19th and 20th centuries while I worked through the museums' storerooms, it became clear to me, that for centuries, the bangle had been the one and only defining material culture shared by all Africans south of the Sahara. At last, an overall picture was emerging and there was now a chance of describing it before it was too late. The bangle culture that had unified Africans, through which and in which they had lived much of their lives, was fading fast. In their heartland of West and Central Africa the tactile bronze bangles that everyone wore in the 19th century - and which I saw occasionally in northern Ghana in the 1980s - were now encountered more in museums than on the bodies of inhabitants of those regions. This book will follow the art-historical practice of using "bronze" to describe all forms of copper alloys, including brass, when the composition is not directly relevant and retain "copper" for occasions when the pure metal is being discussed. "Bangle" will be used as the generic term for all forms of jewellery applied to the human body. This bangle culture is still an unselfconscious part of daily life in a few isolated African tribes and used quite naturally to send messages. But, in a few decades, this bangle culture will survive only in less traditional forms and only in limited areas in East and Southern Africa. At its height, it was an admirable system of great importance to social intercourse, replete with significance, great beauty and craftsmanship. It deserves to be recorded and I will try to do this in this book. I will set out why this bangle culture was so different from anything else in the world; the skill with which the bangles were made; and how the bangle culture spread throughout all Africa south of the Sahara; I will have to admit that the industrial world and its products have led to the Eurasian hierarchy of gold and silver overtaking bronze in Africa and, indeed, eliminating it as a "precious metal". But I will end on a note of hope, that there are indications that the sense of solidity of form and the respect for copper that was evident in classical African bangles may still live on among African Americans.